LET THE MEME BUYER BEWARE

          Memes can be fun!  When created with responsibility and forethought, memes can also be a visually appealing medium to drive home a point using logic or humor, educating and delighting with the brevity of a picture more efficiently than an essay or video ever could.  However, unfortunately, too many "informative" memes posted today in the netherworld of social media are, at best, half-truths not fully vetted, using tenuous or disemboweled logic to the extent that reasonable, thoughtful people simply move on to the next post. However, some memes are so absurd, so fatuous, and incomprehensible that even this author takes pause and, when the meme emphasizes a political point to which blind acquiescence can result in great harm to the greater public welfare, it's time to sharpen the daggers.

          Unobjective, misleading or outright false memes being shared from one person to another is not the exclusive domain of only one political point-of-view.  For instance, a meme shared on social media by more than one friend claimed that Donald Trump told People Magazine in 1998 that "If I were to run (for President), I'd run as a Republican.  They're the dumbest group of voters in the country.  They believe everything on Fox News.  I could lie and they'd still eat it up.  I bet my numbers would be terrific."  When this author and others pointed out this meme (despite its plausibility) was blatantly false, even citing research, the memes remained on their social media pages.

           Another blatantly false post (not quite a meme) shared by more than one person on the Left was from an obvious parody account on Twitter of someone pretending to be ZM Willem-Alexander, King of the Netherlands (replete with a crown icon right next to the name!) that said, "Dear mister Trump.  You see this beautiful building?  It's the International Court of Justice in Our residency The Hague, the Netherlands.  It's waiting for you.  It might take a while. But it's waiting..."  The absurdity of an actual king of a first-world country posting such a message alone, to say nothing of the grammar (None of the original punctuation or capitalization- or lack thereof- of the faux post was altered by me) should have alerted most would-be post sharers, but when this writer told a friend who shared this on their social media page of its dubious origins, the response was, "Oh, well!"  The post stayed.

          However, it has been this author's experience that the majority of misleading, thoughtless posts come from the Right and the post that particularly made me pause was the following, which I guess is supposed to offer some type of commentary on press bias or something.  Let's break down this simple meme, listing some of the problems with it:

1. Timing:  The statistics (more on the veracity of these numbers in a moment) presented are virtually worthless, for they compare numbers for the United States near the end of the H1N1 virus pandemic to those at the onset of COVID-19.  Doing this to demonstrate some type of proportion to make a statement on press bias is intellectually dishonest, as no one could guess the final statistics of the corona virus at the time the meme was first crafted at or around March 10, 2020.

2. Lack of Logic: Presenting statistics that mathematically show the lethal potency of the very pandemic you're trying to downplay is rather myopic.  Highlighting numbers that demonstrate a fatality rate of only .0003695 for the pandemic you're trying to emphasize and then right above that offer numbers showing a fatality rate of 6.7% for the pandemic you're trying to minimize seems rather counterproductive to the point you're trying to make.

3. Panic Level, Part I: The quote "Swine flu sickened 57 million Americans," offered by the meme's creator to demonstrate that, during a pandemic, NBC News and other biased news agencies were using minimalist language to protect the Obama Administration, demonstrates nothing.  The quote in question was the headline of an online article that, in its body, gave a simple recitation of statistics and was not intended at all to be a definitive statement on either the public's or the media's attitudes on the H1N1 pandemic.   (Also, the sentence itself, when standing on its own, is not minimal at all.  Just read it in this paragraph, outside the context of the meme.)

4. Panic Level, Part II: The panic level of "Totally chill" during the H1N1 pandemic (although this assertion is not true- there are numerous stories that survive detailing public anxiety) versus the "Mass hysteria" at the onset of COVID-19 can also be explained in part by knowledege that, unlike the Obama Administration, it is understood by a majority of Americans that the current administration is totally incompetent and in way over their heads.  Time has certainly borne this out.  Just suggesting this as a possibility.  

5. Panic Level, Part III: Highlighting the quote "Swine flu sickened 57 million Americans" is pointless for another reason.  Is the meme's creator attempting to imply that, of all press coverage of the H1N1 virus circa 2009-10, there were no more foreboding quotes or headlines than this?  For a hilarious three minutes of right-wing media using minimalist language to downplay COVID-19, please do a YouTube search for The Daily Show's video "Saluting the Heroes of the Coronavirus Pandumbic," posted April 3, 2020.

6. Bogus Statistics: Never taking something at face value, this author attempted to verify the "22,469" number.  According to their website, the Center of Disease Control (CDC) estimated that 12,469 Americans died from the H1N1 virus based on a range of 8,888-18,306 possible deaths from the pandemic.  Why 12,469 and not the mean of 13,587 was used by the CDC is unknown to this author; that said, the 22,469 statistic is simply made up.  In response to the Right's inevitable complaint that adding 10,000 to the estimated total accounts for all the unreported U.S. H1N1 deaths, one most also hold U.S. COVID-19 statistics to that same liberal standard.

          The only things honest about this meme are its colors and the grammar.  

          Three days (3/13/2020) after this first meme was created and posted, a statistically more accurate meme citing the aforementioned 12,469 U.S. H1N1 deaths, 1,329 U.S. COVID-19 cases and 38 U.S. COVID-19 deaths graced Facebook, with the NBC News headline replaced by the unsupported assertion, "Do you all see how the media can manipulate your life?"  Even this more accurate post was flagged by Facebook in its half-hearted efforts to combat misinformation.  Unfortunately, what is relentlessly accurate are CDC figures as of May 8, 2020:  1,248,040 U.S. COVID-19 cases resulting in 75,477 U.S. COVID-19 deaths.  How many of these lives could have been saved if the COVID-19 pandemic was taken more seriously at the onset instead of being downplayed for transparent political purposes will, unfortunately, never be known.  Let the meme buyer beware.

I WANT MY HAND SANITIZER!!!!!!!!!

   
     Shortly after the onset of the Trump Administration, I found myself on a Facebook thread reading a question posed by an apparent Trump supporter in response to some liberal overemoting on a topic lost to memory that asked, in essence, "How has Trump becoming president affected YOU negatively?," and then went on to say that, macro issues aside, is it really so bad having Trump as president if YOUR life hasn't changed for the worse?  Seeing the concept of evaluating an issue or action solely on its personal impacts, I thought, was the perfect description of the 21st century Republican.  You now, Dick Cheney caring about Gay Rights because one of his daughters came out or rich Republicans who care not a whit about the environment except in their own backyard, etc.

     My mind involuntarily harkened back to these thoughts when I first read the story of Matt Colvin, a Tennessee man who, the day after the news broke of the first American death from COVID-19, decided with his brother to capitalize on the forthcoming tragic pandemic and anticipated panic by buying approximately 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer in the surrounding Kentucky and Tennessee areas with intentions of selling their wares on Amazon for highly inflated prices.  The price gougers were stopped by Jeff Bezos' evil monolith after 300 bottles were already sold at an obscene profit.  The subsequent national outcry over this and stories of others in Pennsylvania and Canada doing the same wicked (to be blunt) thing shamed Mr. Colvin into donating the remaining approximately 17,700 bottles for the public good.

     All's well that ends well, one might incorrectly say, but where was the similar national public outcry when news stories broke out publicizing the skyrocketing, price gouging costs of insulin brands such as Levemir, Novolog, Lantus, and Humalog?  I mean, after all, while one can debate the effectiveness of hand sanitizer alone as a weapon against COVID-19, there is a direct causal relationship between insulin and life for diabetics.  And then I recalled, aha!, the hand sanitizer story sparked outrage because the entire nation as a whole were fruitlessly searching for bottles of it.  They could relate to this shortage- it affected THEM.  Whereas, the need for insulin does not affect everyone, even indirectly.

     What was equally troubling was the number of social media posts that emphasized that COVID-19 was, in general, nothing to fear because most of us are relatively healthy enough to ultimately combat it.  More than one post emphasized the elderly and/or those with heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease, or issues with the immune system as the people who really needed to worry about COVID-19.  Very rarely did these posts not stop there to DEMAND (my emphasis) that all of us need to take precautions to not contract COVID-19, not just for self-preservation, but to ensure that we do not pass it on to those more vulnerable.  Most just left it at the observation that YOU are most likely not vulnerable, a sort of perverse combination of forces of Darwinism and Bentham utilitarianism at play.  The pre-crisis John Stuart Mill would be proud (I can't knock Mill for Wordsworth's poetry being the catalyst for Mill overcoming his crisis- the Beach Boys' Endless Summer had the same impact on me during a personal crisis many moons ago).

     Oh, back to the thesis statement-less, first paragraph:  were the toilet paper hoarding, hand sanitizing price gouging, and strictly self-preservation COVID-19 perspectives examples of a solely a Republican mindset?  No, snatches from all ends of the political spectrum are exhibiting this behavior.  With a broad brush is this, then, an American mindset?  This writer doesn't know and cannot quite make out what the ghost of John F. Kennedy is trying to say, but it sounds like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for you."